The Bravest Thing Nobody Talks About

 

We are so quick to say it. Selfish. How could they do that to their family? To their children? To the people who loved them?

Losing someone that way is devastating and the grief that follows is complicated in ways that are hard to put into words. Those feelings are valid.

But here is what most people never see or even talk about for that matter.

They never see the hundreds of times that person decided not to. The thousands of moments they white-knuckled their way through the darkness, fighting with everything they had just to make it to the next minute. The next hour. The next breath.

That is not weakness. That is some of the most extraordinary courage a human being can show. And it takes a special kind of strength to live with a suicidal mind that ruminates 24 hours a day.

I know this because I lived it. And what I can tell you from the inside is that the people we call selfish are often the ones who were fighting the hardest...quietly, invisibly, in ways nobody around them ever knew.

We need to change the way we talk about this. Not just for the people we have lost, but for the ones who are still here, still fighting, and desperately need to know that someone sees how brave they really are.

I see you.

If this resonates with you, my book The Suicide Solution comes out July 1st. This is the conversation I have spent years working up to, and it is just getting started.